But Mir Jafar had a son-in-law, Mir Qasim, as different a man as could be imagined from his chaotic and uneducated father-in-law. Of noble Persian extraction, though born on his father’s estates near Patna, Mir Qasim was small in frame, with little military experience, but young, capable, intelligent and, above all, determined.58
Warren Hastings was the first to spot his unusual qualities; he was also the first to make clear to Calcutta the urgent need to bring in a new administration to Murshidabad if Bengal was to remain governable. Mir Qasim’s ‘education has been suitable to his noble birth,’ he wrote, ‘and there are few accomplishments held requisite for those of highest Rank which he does not possess in an eminent degree. He has given many proofs of his integrity, a capacity for business, and a strict adherence to his Engagements. He is generally respected by the Jamadars [officers] & Persons of Distinction in this Province, and I have seen Letters addressed to him from the Principal Zamindars of Bihar, filled with expressions of the highest respect for this character, and their earnest desire to be under his Government.’59
Mir Qasim was duly sent down to Calcutta to meet the new Governor, Henry Vansittart. During the interview he came up with a sophisticated scheme both to solve the Company’s financial problems and to repay the Murshidabad debt, by ceding to the Company Burdwan, Midnapur and Chittagong – sufficient territories to pay for the upkeep of both armies. Vansittart was impressed, and decided to back a coup, or second revolution, to put Mir Qasim on the throne in place of his father-in-law. A series of large bribes, including a cash payment of £50,000 to Vansittart personally, and £150,000* to be distributed among his council, cemented the deal.60
Meanwhile, on 10 July 1761, matters came to a head in Murshidabad, giving the Company both the excuse and the perfect cover for their second coup: ‘The army, demanding their pay which had come into arrears for some years, finally mutinied in a body’, recorded the Riyazu-s-salatin. ‘The mutineers surrounded the palace, pulling their officers from their horses and palanquins, climbing the palace walls and throwing masonry down on palace servants. Then they besieged the Nawab in his Chihil Sutun palace, and cut off supplies of food and water.’
Mir Qasim, in concert with Jagat Seth, conspired with the English chiefs … brought Mir Jafar out from the Fort, placed him in a boat, and sent him down to Calcutta [as if to rescue him and saying it was for his own safety]. At the same time, Mir Qasim entered the fort, mounted the musnud [throne] and issued proclamations of peace and security in his own name.61
Mir Jafar was given an escort, led by the ubiquitous Major Caillaud, ‘to protect his person from the insults of the people, and he was permitted to take with him women, jewels, treasure and whatever else he thought proper’.62 As he was rowed downstream, finally realising that he had been not so much rescued as deposed, a baffled Mir Jafar begged to be allowed to appeal to his patron, Clive: ‘The English placed me on the musnud,’ he said. ‘You may depose me if you please. You have thought proper to break your engagements. I will not break with mine. I desire you will either send me to Sabut Jung [Clive], for he will do me justice, or let me go to Mecca.’63
But the elderly, failing former Nawab, now of no further use to the Company, was allowed neither of his preferred options. Instead he was given a modest townhouse in north Calcutta, and an equally modest pension, and for several months was kept under strict house arrest. The second revolution engineered by the Company, this time against their own puppet, turned out to be even smoother than the first, and completely bloodless.
But the man they had just put in charge of Bengal would prove to be less easy to bully than Mir Jafar. As the Tarikh-i Muzaffari succinctly put it, ‘Mir Qasim quickly succeeded in achieving a degree of independence from the English that is now hard to imagine.’64
Even Warren Hastings, who greatly admired Mir Qasim’s abilities, was surprised by the speed with which he turned matters around.
The new Nawab first quickly dispersed the mutinous sepoys of Murshidabad by paying them from his own treasury. He then applied himself to sorting out finances and surprised everyone with his administrative skills: ‘Mir Qasim Khan was very skilled in extracting information and in analysing written reports and accounts,’ wrote the historian Mohammad Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat. ‘He embarked immediately on the project of bringing the land of Bengal back into some sort of order.’
He called in the state accountants and tax-gatherers, examining their accounts closely to find out any peculation committed by functionaries of the previous regime. He had Raja Ram Narain [the Governor of Patna, who had helped defeat Shah Alam] brought in for questioning and demanded to see the revenue accounts for Bihar. Any sums claimed to have been made as payments for army salaries were inspected by his tax-gatherers, whom he sent to check the actual numbers of soldiers present, and to correct the record accordingly. After this, Raja Ram Narain, accused on several counts, was imprisoned. Some 15 lakhs rupees* of the Raja’s personal wealth was confiscated, together with his jewels.65
At first, Mir Qasim struggled to pay the money he owed the British, despite these seizures. He increased taxes to almost double what they had been under Aliverdi Khan, successfully raising Rs30 million** annually – twice the Rs18 million gathered by the regime before Plassey.66 Meanwhile, the new Nawab began to develop a coherent strategy to deal with the British: he decided more or less to abandon lower Bengal to the Company, but worked to keep their influence at a minimum elsewhere. He also established a highly centralised military state, which he sustained by seizing the property and treasure from any officials he suspected of corruption: ‘he pursued with vexations anyone suspected of harbouring wealth and any who held even the slightest enmity towards himself, immediately taking over their hidden riches. In this manner, gold flowed in plenty into the treasury of Mir Qasim Khan.’67
In accordance with his restructuring plan, Mir Qasim decided to leave his uncle in charge of Murshidabad, which he thought too vulnerable to interference from Calcutta, and to rule instead from Bihar, as far as possible from the Company’s headquarters. He first moved to Patna, occupying the fort apartments vacated by the now imprisoned Raja Ram Narain. Here he briefly set up court, until the hostility and interference of the Company’s aggressive Chief Factor there, William Ellis, prompted him to move a little downstream to the old Mughal fortress of Monghyr where he could not be spied on by the Company.
At Monghyr he continued to reform the finances. He ordered the Jagat Seths to join him, marched them over from Murshidabad under guard and confined them to the fort. There he forced them to pay off both the Nawab’s outstanding obligations to the Company and the arrears of the Murshidabad troops.
The better to enforce his will, and also, implicitly, to protect him from the Company, he then reformed his army. The 90,000 troops Mir Qasim was supposed to possess on paper turned out to muster less than half that in reality. Incompetent and corrupt generals were dismissed and he began recruiting new troops, forming a fresh force of 16,000 crack Mughal horse and three battalion of European-style sepoys, amounting to around 25,000 infantry.
To drill them in the new European manner he next appointed two Christian mercenaries. The first was Walter Reinhardt, nicknamed Sumru or Sombre, a gloomy and coldly emotionless Alsatian German soldier of fortune. He had been born to a poor farmer with a smallholding on the Moselle in the Lower Palatinate of the Rhine, and had risen to become a mounted cuirassier guard in the French army where he had fought with bravery at the Battle of Ittingen. Finding himself in Holland, he had caught a ship to India on a whim, where, according to one of his colleagues, the Comte de Modave, he soon took ‘on the habits and indeed the prejudices of this country to such a degree that even the Mughals believe he was born in Hindustan. He speaks nearly all the local languages, but can neither read nor write. Nevertheless, through his staff, he keeps up an extensive correspondence.’68
Mir Qasim’s second Christian commander was Khoja Gregory, an Isfahani Armenian to whom Mir Qasim gave the
title Gurghin Khan, or the Wolf. Ghulam Hussain Khan met him and thought him a remarkable man: ‘above ordinary size, strongly built, with a very fair complexion, an aquiline nose and large black eyes, full of fire’.69 The job of both men was to train up Mir Qasim’s forces so that they could equal those of the Company. They also started armaments factories to provide their master with high-quality modern muskets and cannon. Soon Mir Qasim ‘was amassing and manufacturing as many guns and flint muskets as he could, with every necessary for war’.70
The new Nawab also set up a formidable new intelligence network, with three head spies, each with hundreds of informers under them. Before long, all three of his intelligence chiefs had been executed for their suspected intrigues. Mir Qasim’s rule was quickly proving as chilling as it was effective. ‘So suspicious a government soon interrupted all social intercourse,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, who was terrified of the new Nawab. ‘He was ever prone to the confiscation of properties, confinement of persons, and the effusion of blood … People accustomed to a certain set of acquaintances and visits, now found themselves under the necessity of living quietly at home.’71
Yet the historian still greatly admired the Nawab’s extraordinary administrative skills: ‘He had some admirable qualities,’ he admitted,
that balanced his bad ones. In unravelling the intricacies of the affairs of Government, and especially in the knotty mysteries of finance; in establishing regular payments for his troops, and for his household; in honouring and rewarding men of merit, and men of learning; in conducting his expenditure, exactly between the extremities of parsimony and prodigality; and in knowing intuitively where he must spend freely, and where with moderation – in all these qualifications he was an incomparable man indeed; and the most extraordinary Prince of his age.72
But beyond the efficiency a darker side to the rule of the new Nawab began to emerge. Many men began to disappear. Rich landowners and bureaucrats were summoned to Monghyr, imprisoned, tortured and stripped of their wealth, whether they were guilty of corruption or not: ‘Many were executed on a mere suspicion,’ wrote Ansari. ‘These killings instilled such fear in the hearts of people, that they dared not speak out against him or his policies, and no-one felt safe in their own home.’73
After the Battle of Helsa in early January 1761, the Mughal Emperor found himself in the unexpected position of being on the run from the mercenary troops of a once humble trading company.
The redcoats tracked him relentlessly. On 24 January, Major John Carnac wrote to Calcutta telling his masters, ‘We have kept following the prince ever since the action, and press so closely upon him that sometimes we find the fires of his camp still burning … His army must be totally dispersed … and he reduced so low as to be more an object of pity than fear.’74
Yet it was only now, after the Company had defeated Shah Alam, and his army had largely dissolved, that the British began to understand the moral power still wielded by the Emperor. Shah Alam had lost everything – even his personal baggage, writing table and calligraphy case, which had fallen from his howdah when his elephant charged off the battlefield – and he could now offer his followers almost nothing of any practical value. And yet they continued to revere him: ‘It is inconceivable how the name of the king merely should prepossess all minds so strongly in his favour,’ wrote Carnac. ‘Yet so it is that even in his present distressed condition he is held by both Musselmans and Gentoos [Muslims and Hindus] in a kind of adoration.’
Carnac was as skilled a politician as he was a soldier, and noted, perceptively: ‘We may hereafter have it in our power to employ this prepossession to our advantage; in the meantime the axe is laid to the root of the troubles which have so long infested this province.’75
In the aftermath of his defeat, Shah Alam had also had time to revaluate his position with regard to the Company and realised that both sides had much to offer each other. After all, he had no wish to rule Bengal directly. Ever since the time Akbar made his former Rajput enemy Raja Jai Singh the commander of his army, the Mughals had always had the happy knack of turning their former enemies into useful allies. Perhaps now, Shah Alam seems to have wondered, he could use the British in the same way Akbar used the Rajputs to effect his ends? In the eyes of most Indians the Company lacked any legal right to rule. It was in Shah Alam’s power to grant them the legitimacy they needed. Maybe an alliance could be formed, and British arms could carry him back to Delhi, remove the usurper, Imad ul-Mulk, and restore him to his rightful throne?
On 29 January an emissary from the Emperor arrived in Carnac’s camp, with proposals for a settlement. Ambassadors passed backwards and forwards, messages were sent to Calcutta, and eventually, on 3 February, a meeting was arranged in a mango grove near Gaya. Ghulam Hussain Khan was there, as his father had volunteered to act as Shah Alam’s intermediary with the British: ‘The Emperor was advancing with his troops in battle array towards the English camp, when, about midday, the Major made his appearance with his officers.’
Pulling off his hat, and putting it under his arm, he advanced in that posture, marching on foot close to the Emperor’s elephant; but the monarch commanded him to be mounted. Carnac got on horseback, and taking his station alone, he preceded the Emperor’s elephant by about an arrow’s shot. My father, on his elephant, followed the Emperor at a small distance, both men leading the imperial troops, all armed and ready.
At the spot where the troops were to encamp, the Emperor, at Major Carnac’s request, entered a tent pitched in a garden surrounded by a grove, where were conducted the usual [welcome] ceremonies of paan, ittar and rose-water, while dancing girls and musicians provided entertainment for the evening.76
The next day the two armies set off together to Patna. Few from the Company had ever seen a Mughal Emperor, and as news spread of Shah Alam’s approach the entire British community in Bihar turned out to see him, joining the throngs lining the streets to catch a glimpse. It was a scene rich with irony: the victors excitedly going out of their way to honour the somewhat surprised vanquished, a man who had spent much of the previous year trying his best to expel them from India. Even the interpreter on this occasion was Archibald Swinton, the man who had chased Shah Alam’s elephant from the battlefield at Helsa, and who had then appropriated the Emperor’s personal baggage.77
Yet both parties recognised that this was a situation which benefited everyone, and played their part in the charade: ‘The English were busy turning their factory into an Imperial hall of audience,’ noted Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘arranging a couple of those [long] tables where they take their meals, into a Hindostany throne.’
[Before long,] the hall, being spread and hung with rich stuffs, assumed a very splendid appearance … The English assembled in great numbers. These, on hearing the Emperor’s being on his march, set out on foot with the Major at their head, and after meeting the Monarch, they continued to march on foot, along with his moving throne. The Emperor, having alighted at the gate of the factory, got into the hall, and took his seat on his throne. The English were standing to the right and left of it. The Major made a profound bow and took his seat.78
The only person displeased with this turn of events was the newly installed Nawab, Mir Qasim. He feared, with good reason, that now the Company had the Emperor in their clutches, the usefulness of a tame Nawab was diminished, and that the Company might ask to have themselves appointed in his stead. Mir Qasim was right to be anxious on this score: this was indeed an option the Council in Calcutta had weighed up, but decided not to pursue for the time being.79
So it was that Mir Qasim finally met his Emperor, the Refuge of the World, sitting on a makeshift throne, within an East India Company opium factory. After some courtly haggling behind the scenes, a deal had been fixed. Mir Qasim duly bowed three times, offering the Emperor his obedience, and made a formal nazar [offering] of 1,001 gold coins, ‘and a number of trays covered with precious and curious stuffs for apparel, to which he added a quantity of jewels and other costly a
rticles. The Emperor accepted his homage, and honoured him with a chaplet of pearls, and an aigrette of jewels, adorned with black eagle’s feathers.’
In Mughal court language this amounted to a formal investiture, confirming Mir Qasim in the Subadhari [governorship] of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, so ratifying and legalising the Company’s two successive revolutions. In return, Mir Qasim announced he would resume Bengal’s annual payments to the Mughal Emperor, promising an enormous annual tribute of 2.5 million rupees, which then equated to around £325,000. Meanwhile, the English settled on the Emperor a daily allowance of Rs1,800.*80
Both sides had reason to be happy with the unexpected way events had been resolved. Shah Alam in particular found himself richer than he had ever been, with a steady flow of income that he could only have dreamed of a few weeks earlier. Only in one thing was he disappointed: Shah Alam wanted his useful new ally, the Company, to send a regiment of sepoys immediately, to install him back on his throne in Delhi. Many in the army, and even some in Calcutta, were attracted by the idea of a Delhi expedition; but given the turbulence of the capital, which was currently hosting yet another unwanted visit from the bloodthirsty Afghan monarch, Ahmad Shah Durrani, Vansittart in the end decided to put off any decision about reinstalling the Shah, ‘until after the rains’.81
Three months later, seeing that he was making no progress with his plan to return home to the Red Fort, an impatient Shah Alam announced his departure. His next port of call, he said, would be Avadh. There he hoped the rich and powerful Nawab Shuja ud-Daula would be more pliable.
Mir Qasim was delighted to get rid of the Emperor, and to hasten his departure paid him up front, and in cash, half the promised annual tribute. Nor did the East India Company have any reason to detain the Emperor, having now extracted from him all they needed. On receiving formal letters of submission from all the principal warlords in north India, on 5 June 1761 Shah Alam finally left, heading west towards the border with Avadh.82
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